Emanuel (Emo) Vassilev Todorov (born 1971), a

neuroscientist A neuroscientist (or neurobiologist) is a scientist specializing in neuroscience that deals with the anatomy and function of neurons, Biological neural network, neural circuits, and glia, and their Behavior, behavioral, biological, and psycholo ...

, is an associate professor and director of the Movement Control Laboratory at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW and informally U-Dub or U Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the Uni ...

. He introduced the use of

optimal control Optimal control theory is a branch of control theory that deals with finding a control for a dynamical system over a period of time such that an objective function is optimized. It has numerous applications in science, engineering and operations ...

as a formal explanatory framework for biological movement (see below). He is the principal developer of the MuJoCo physics engine. Todorov completed his PhD in

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

under the supervision of

Michael Jordan Michael Jeffrey Jordan (born February 17, 1963), also known by his initials MJ, is an American businessman and former professional basketball player, who is currently a minority owner of the Charlotte Hornets of the National Basketball Ass ...

and

Whitman Richards Whitman Albin Richards (1932–16 September 2016) was professor of cognitive sciences and of media arts and sciences and principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Te ...

. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL under

Peter Dayan Peter Dayan is a British neuroscientist and computer scientist who is director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, along with Ivan De Araujo. He is co-author of ''Theoretical Neuroscience'', an influent ...

and

Geoffrey Hinton Geoffrey Everest Hinton (born 1947) is a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive scientist, and cognitive psychologist known for his work on artificial neural networks, which earned him the title "the Godfather of AI". Hinton is Univer ...

. He is a recipient of the 2004

Sloan Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

in neuroscience. In 2002 he proposed that stochastic optimal control principles are a good theoretical framework for explaining biological movement. In 2011 this view was acknowledged by one of its critics,

Karl Friston Karl John Friston FRS FMedSci FRSB (born 12 July 1959) is a British neuroscientist and theoretician at University College London. He is an authority on brain imaging and theoretical neuroscience, especially the use of physics-inspired stati ...

, to have become "the dominant paradigm for understanding motor behavior in formal or computational terms." It has been described in the popular scientific press together with other connections between biology and optimisation principles. An editorial comment by Kenji Doya about one of Todorov's articles in PNAS called it "a refreshingly new approach in optimal control based on a novel insight as to the duality of optimal control and statistical inference". His work on robotic hands has been featured in popular publications on robotics. In January 2017 he was interviewed for the

Robots Podcast "\n\n\n\n\n\n\nrobots.txt is the filename used for implementing the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other Internet bot, web robots which portions of the website they are allowed to visi ...

. He is the recipient of 11

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

grant awards totalling more than $7.5 million as Principal Investigator.

References

External links

The Movement Control Laboratory

{{DEFAULTSORT:Todorov, Emanuel Living people American neuroscientists Bulgarian neurologists 1971 births Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni Artificial intelligence researchers University of Washington faculty